Highlights

Pakistan's interior minister Chaudhry Nisar said there should be a distinction made between banned terrorist outfits and banned sectarian organizations

He was defending his meeting last October with the head of a banned sectarian group

Shia Muslims hold a banner during a protest in Quetta February 18, 2013. Pakistani Shias furious over a sectar...Read More

NEW DELHI: Pakistan's interior minister has publicly and unwittingly acknowledged something the world has long known - Islamabad makes a distinction between 'good terrorists' and 'bad terrorists'. And the government is now facing a backlash from an aghast opposition for promoting this distinction, Pakistani media reported. Last week, in the Pakistani Senate, interior minister Chaudhry Nisar said there should be a distinction made between banned terrorist outfits and banned sectarian organizations. The meaning of the former is self evident; the latter refers to extremist religious organizations. Nisar's comments were no slip of the tongue, because yesterday, he went so far as to say there should be separate laws for the two groups. “Those suggesting that I uttered something sacrilegious by saying terrorist organisations and those organisations that were proscribed on the basis of sectarian differences are different have not examined the record,” he said, referring to the list of proscribed organisations compiled by the National Counter Terrorism Authority (Nacta). “Can Allama Sajid Naqvi be linked to any terrorist organisation? Can [Syed Hamid Ali Shah] Moosavi be linked to a terrorist organisation? No, they are patriotic Pakistanis," Nisar said about the two Shia leaders, whose groups are indeed on the Nacta list. When Nisar first made these comments last week, stunned Senate members staged a walk out. The opposition Pakistan People's Party called minister Nisar "a spokesman [for] terrorist outfits". Another opposition member, MQM senator Tahir Hussain said the interior minister's remarks were surprising as some sectarian organisations were more dangerous and cruel than the Taliban. Hussain accused the government of promoting sectarianism, and added that "sectarian outfits were equally terrorists," Dawn reported. Nisar made those remarks in the context of his defending his meeting with Ahmed Ludhianivi, chief of the banned sectarian organisation Ahle-e-Sunnat Wal Jamaat (ASWJ). Last month, a Pakistan Supreme Court-constituted commission came down heavily against Nisar for meeting with the banned group in October. The Commission - set up to investigate the August Quetta massacre - went so far as to say the country's central government was "cavorting with" banned terror groups, Dawn reported. Clearly that made no difference to Nisar. "It is unfair to link everything to Maulana Ludhiyanvi," he said yesterday, referring to criticism of his meeting with the head of the banned ASWJ. The Pakistani press took Nisar to task for his comments, but such things have never made much difference in the past. "...to suggest that sectarian violence is some lesser form of terrorism, which is what the interior minister's words imply, is wrong: it is the very bedrock upon which terrorism of the kind we see in Pakistan is based," said a Dawn editorial

A Pakistan ki Awaz editorial titled 'Chaudhry Nisar's wisdom' was scathing in its criticism of Nisar. "For the security czar of a country battling the malign effects of terrorism to be attempting to draw fine distinctions between sectarian and other terrorism, in a pale mirror image of Musharraf's good and bad Taliban binary, beggars belief. Sectarian terrorism's toll is as horrendous, if not worse, than 'pure' terrorism. And is the worthy minister unaware of the nexus between sectarian and other terrorist organisations? Terrorists are terrorists, period," the editorial wrote.